The government will “get it right next time” on exam grades, foreign secretary Dominic Raab has said today.

During a television interview, he accepted that the handling of the GCSE and A-level results had been an imperfect process, but said the government had learned lessons.

He also said that “the one thing we had wanted to avoid was grade inflation” after this year’s exams were cancelled because of Covid-19.

Mr Raab suggested the government should be judged on successfully getting schools to return this month.

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The government’s handling of exams has been the source of massive controversy this summer resulting in a U-turn in the way in which grades were awarded after A-level results had been published.

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Mr Raab was questioned about this during an interview on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show this morning.

He said: “The one thing we wanted to avoid was the grade inflation that comes in relying exclusively on projected grades, but we got to the point at which it was very clear that the algorithm would create unfairness and we had to respond to that and we did.

“I accept it was an imperfect process, we understand that - nobody wants that for the children and parents and families.  We will get it right next time. What I would say is that we have learned a lot along the way.”

Ofqual and the Department for Education had planned to give students a moderated grade that took into account assessed grades submitted by schools and colleges, a student’s ranking in their school and the school’s past performance.

However, this caused a major outcry after A-level results were published and it emerged that around 40 per cent of the centre-assessed grades submitted by schools had been downgraded by Ofqual’s algorithm process.

Andrew Marr asked Mr Raab whether he accepted that the public’s trust in the government had been damaged by its handling of exams.

Mr Raab, who is a former member of the Commons Education Select Committee, said: “What I would say is judge us by our results. We got schools back this week. We protected 12 million jobs. If you look at the hospitalisation rate, it’s gone from a peak of 3,000 per day to 100 per day.”